A (rare) good news story

There isn’t so much good news around at the moment to want to pass by a piece that comes my way. And this one particularly attracted my attention because it linked to some local knowledge of mine. And, after just four years living in Spain, my local knowledge tends to be either extremely local or non-existent.

Up in the hills above and to the north of Madrid stands the village of Hoyo de Manzanares, lively, pleasant and welcoming. It’s where our grandkids, Matilda and Elliott live. Just for the avoidance of confusion, let me assure you, and this may come as a relief to you (since they're four and two and a half respectively), that their parents live there with them.

The next town eastward is Colmenar Viejo. I’ve always liked it for its name. It means ‘old beehive’. Whenever I see the name, usually on a signpost, I wonder whether honey’s better from an old hive, like wine from old vines. Alternatively, it might be a place that old bees retreat to. Or, again, it may mean that there never was a beehive there at all, rather like the community where we live, ‘Los Sauces’, the Willows, without a single willow anywhere within kilometres of the place.

The town hall and main square of Old Beehive

I most recently came across Colmenar Viejo’s name not on a signpost but in the headline of a newspaper article. The story was about a woman from the town. Her name is Eva Nogales and if you’ve never heard of her, well, neither had I.

It turns out that she’s shared this year’s Shaw Prize with a German scientist. What, you may be wondering, as I did, is the Shaw Prize? It turns out it’s an award for outstanding science set up by a businessman from Hong Kong. The prize is seen as a kind of ‘oriental Nobel prize’. Indeed, it appears that one in every seven recipients of the Shaw go on to win a Nobel too.

She won her share for the work of a team she leads in Berkeley, California, which mapped the structure, atom by atom, of proteins that play a vital role inside the human body. 

‘All life is chemistry,’ she points out, ‘ultimately, in biology, everything’s chemistry.’

She goes on to point out that everything comes down to 20 compounds called amino acids, which act like Lego pieces out of which complex proteins can form. 

‘With just twenty elements we have all the beauty of life, from a bacterium to an elephant, by way of a sea sponge.’

If you’ve read this far, you may be thinking, ‘well, OK, this is all very well and fine, but it’s not that extraordinary, is it? After all, there are winners of major scientific prizes every year, aren’t there?’

That’s true. But not that many of them are women. And even fewer are the daughters of a shepherd father and a seamstress mother, both of whom had to leave school to go to work when they were eleven or twelve. Eva Nogales grew up with parents that humble in their origins, but intensely committed to their daughter’s having the opportunity to study.

Eva Nogales, winner of an international science prize,
from Colmenar Viejo (Old Beehive)

She’s back in Colmenar Viejo at the moment. She returned to spend Christmas with her mother (her father died some years ago). While there, she met three teachers who were central in sending her towards a career in science, her teachers of biology, physics and mathematics. All three are women.

It’s a great story, isn’t it? Though the message is perhaps not quite as positive as it seems at first sight. That’s for precisely the reasons that make it so attractive.

Her recognition by the scientific establishment is lovely, but wouldn’t it be great if it were common for women? It’s wonderful to see someone from a humble background rise as far in international prominence as Eva Nogales, but whatever believers in the American Dream might suggest, that’s not common either, is it? And, though this is less important than the other two, wouldn’t many Europeans be pleased to see Europe rekindling the extraordinary dynamism in science it knew before World War 2, and offer as encouraging an environment to its top performers as Berkeley or other American universities?

Of course, if all those things were as normal as I’d like, the Eva Nogales story wouldn’t be so striking. Its very rarity makes it attractive. That rarity’s rather sad.

Still, let’s enjoy it anyway. Next time I’m in Hoyo, perhaps I can get across to Colmenar Viejo. And if I do, I’ll make a point of wandering down the street renamed ‘Avenida Evangelina Nogales de la Morena’, in honour of a local girl made good and a fine scientist.

It’s all in the timing

It must have been sixty years ago that I started to learn French. That was at a weirdly English school, even though it was in Rome. Its Englishness was above all in its spirit and in the teachers it recruited

Our teacher was English and one of the few things I remember of her teaching, was when she told us earnestly that we had to learn to distinguish between the French words ‘ay’ and ‘ay’ (that’s the same sound as the ‘ai’ in ‘pain’ and would have been deeply painful to anyone who knew more French than I did).

She meant the words ‘et’ and ‘est’ and neither is pronounced ‘ay’.

The only other thing I remember from those classes was the tale of a sign seen outside a French teashop early in the twentieth century. That was a time when the custom of tea drinking was being adopted from the Britain where, French people then and, indeed, in many cases now, see it as a long and deep-rooted tradition.

As a quick digression, that’s a misleading belief.

Back in 1652, in that strange period when England was a republic and Puritans were a lot too powerful, the first coffee shops opened. They served a drink that we would probably regard as an undrinkable sludge today. But people back then liked it, especially for the buzz it gave them. The Puritans, who abhorred alcohol though they never actually banned it, were happy to see people going for this alternative, which contained no alcohol and didn’t leave them drunk.

Coffee houses proliferated over the next few decades. They became favoured meeting places, with many developing a specific character of their own. Some focused on people in business – Lloyds of London, the insurance operation, was founded in a coffee house which gave it its name (it was Lloyds Coffee House). Others were political, with supporters of different factions gathering in different establishments. Others might cater to artists or writers or journalists, and so on.

This was before tea had become a national beverage. Though it wasn’t long before. Just eight years later, after the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, who’d developed a taste for this infusion of leaves from the far east, began to drink tea in England.

The fashion spread rapidly, in the upper circles of English society, where ladies would serve each other this delicate drink when they met in the afternoon. So note two things about that: it was a drink taken at home, not in an establishment outside like a coffeehouse. That made it a drink fit for women, or at least ladies, who would not have liked visiting a coffee house, with its male-dominated, rowdy atmosphere. And it was a drink people preferred to take in the afternoon.

As the price fell, so the custom of drinking tea extended into ever broader circles of society, ceasing to be exclusive to the very wealthiest (or ‘best’ as they liked to think of themselves, and still do). Gradually England, and later Britain, became the temple to tea drinking that it’s reputed to be today. That’s even though it was a coffee-drinking nation earlier and, to this day, drinks more coffee than tea.

Now there are many times of day when a Brit might drink tea. With breakfast. During the morning. In the afternoon. With the evening meal which, by continental standards, Britain tends to take early (at around 6:00) and is often called ‘tea’. Classically, though, just as in the time of the restoration, tea is a drink for the afternoon, at about 4:00.

‘Four o’clock tea’ therefore became something of an institution.

And the sign outside the French teashop?

My class learned that it read ‘Ici on sert le four o’clock à cinq heures’ – here we serve the ‘four o’clock’ at five o’clock.

We all chortled.

I was reminded of all that when I saw an old flapping notice on a board in Valencia, where we live.

The municipal authorities had decided that there was some benefit in reproducing, in the city, the Oktoberfest made famous by the German city of Munich, in Bavaria. You’ve probably seen pictures of buxom German women in traditional dress carrying handfuls of those massive stone beer tankards the Germans call ‘Steine’ (which means ‘stones’). Clearly, Valencia had concluded that having their own Oktoberfest would be both fun and, probably, a money spinner, both of them attractive characteristics. So they’d organised one.

What I was looking at was a publicity poster for it.

Advertising Valencia’s Oktoberfest

It read:

IMPORTANT

The official Valencia OKTOBERFEST 

will start on 15 September.

An October festival in September? Yep. Just as much fun as the four o’clock served at five.

From Boston to Gaza: learning nothing from experience

It can be such a bore, studying history. And what’s the point anyway? As Henry Ford so rightly pointed out, the only lesson to learn from history is that no one learns any lessons from history. 

It’s much more exciting just to go blasting ahead and learn by surprise that things work out just as badly for you as they did for the last guy to try the same trick. Not a pleasant surprise, of course. Just a surprise which you’d have been denied had you gone to the tedious lengths of trying to learn from experience.

Take British General George Gage, way back in 1768. This was when the Americans, and above all the inhabitants of Boston, were revolting. They were doing things like boycotting British goods, distributing incendiary leaflets against the enlightened rule of the British government, and generally behaving as though they were entitled to the same rights as the British born. 

But Gage had the answer. He landed 3500 troops to occupy the city. At the time, the population numbered 16,000, so that was close to one soldier for every four Bostonians. Since he knew the troubles were all down to a small band of hotheads, he knew he’d sort them out, with that level of force, in no time at all.

To his astonishment, it turned out he was mistaken. Far from a few hotheads stirring up trouble, there was no sympathy anywhere in the city for British rule, and especially none for the ‘lobsters’, British soldiers in their red uniforms. On 17 March 1776, British forces, by then increased to 11,000, had to evacuate the city. The event is still marked annually by a holiday known as ‘Evacuation Day’.

British troops evacuating Boston after failing to pacify the city

Within four months, the American colonies had declared themselves independent of Britain, and within seven years, they’d achieved that independence.

Or take the Spanish, four decades later. At the time Spain, which has had more than its share of appalling kings, had been suffering under one of its worst, Charles IV. His son Ferdinand VII would be still worse, so awful that in his carefully balanced and moderately toned book on Spanish history, Una historia de España, Arturo Pérez Reverte describes him as the greatest ‘hijo de puta’ in the country’s rich history of such ‘sons of whores’ (that’s a literal translation: I’m sure you can think of plenty of English expressions that communicate the same degree of respect and admiration).

And yet when, in neighbourly fashion, France decided to free Spain of such men, ‘inviting’ both father and son to be their ‘guests’ across the border, ultimately replacing them with Joseph, brother of the then French Emperor Napoleon, the Spanish people showed no gratitude. Quite honestly, replacing their own ‘hijos de puta’ by a foreign military occupation didn’t leave them feeling particularly liberated. On the 2nd of May 1808, there was an uprising in Madrid in which a number of French troops were killed, an event strikingly recorded by the outstanding painter Francisco Goya.

Francisco Goya’s painting of the French Mameluke soldiers
under attack by the people of Madrid on 2 May 1808

No problem, decided Murat, overall commander of the French troops in Spain. He was a highly effective general, one of Napoleon’s great cavalry commanders, and he commanded serious forces from what was then Europe’s, and probably the world’s, best-trained, best-led and most effective army. He could sort out this uppity behaviour in no time at all.

The next day, the 3rd of May, he had several hundred men rounded up around Madrid and shot. Again, Francisco Goya depicted the executions, producing what has become one of his most celebrated paintings. With hindsight, we view the rising and the shootings as the starting point of what came to be known as the Peninsular War, covering Spain and Portugal, which culminated five years later with the French armies driven back across the Pyrenees into France.

The Third of May shootings, depicted by Francisco Goya

Sadly, that left Spain saddled with its ‘hijos de puta’. But what it mostly showed, as the people of Boston had shown Gage, was that a civilian population that loathes you, is unlikely to be pacified by military force. Even if it is the best in the world.

I could go on and on. But let’s summarise.

In 1916, Britain put down the Easter uprising in Dublin, and shot a number of the ringleaders. That included one of the finest political leaders not just of the time but of all time, James Connolly, who had to be shot tied to a chair, because the wounds he’d received in the earlier fighting made it impossible for him to stand to face the firing squad. He would have died of his injuries within a day or two anyway.

And yet, within six years, 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties had broken free of British rule.

Between 1954 and 1962, France sent colossal armed force into Algeria to put down a rising for independence. I personally knew one of the soldiers who went, a civilian conscripted into the French army at a time when military service was still obligatory, and who came back so destroyed by what he’d seen – and perhaps what he’d done – that he never recovered and died, a depressive alcoholic with his liver shot to hell, in his forties. The war was marked by the widespread use of military force, backed by brutal police action, torture and executions. 

And at the end, where did that lead? Despite the murder of many leaders, the Algerian National Liberation Front ultimately achieved its aim and France was forced to leave its colony.

And what about those six counties in Ireland that didn’t go with the rest of the island when it broke free from Britain back in 1922? I remember the terrible shock of seeing news coverage on the invasion of the most fiercely nationalist area of the city of Derry, the Bogside, in 1972, on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday.

At the time, the most effective organisation opposed to British rule in Ireland, the Irish Republican Army or IRA, had hit bad times. It had few members or resources and was unable to do much in the way of mounting operations. But then, on Bloody Sunday, the British army decided that it could pacify the Bogside, in no time at all, by sending in crack units, paratroops. In they went and at the end of the operation, thirteen civilians had been killed.

That night, the IRA was inundated with volunteers demanding to be enlisted.

It took 25 years of the so-called ‘Troubles’ before, by political and diplomatic action rather than military force, a way out was finally found, in the Good Friday agreement that brought peace at last to the six counties. For a moment, it looked as though we had at last learned a lesson, learned that blundering into a civilian population like George Gage in Boston in 1768, was no way to solve this kind of problem. That military force couldn’t beat insurgents with popular support, but would only do shameful harm and drum up more support for the insurgents.

Which makes it all the sadder to see what’s happening in Gaza today. Because the Israeli government, entirely justified in reacting to the horrifying terrorist attack on its civilians on 7 October, entirely justified because of the sheer venomous brutality of the assault, has chosen to react not with intelligence and targeted skill, but in the most blundering, incompetent and inappropriate way imaginable. It’s sent the heaviest of forces into Gaza, the most densely populated place on Earth, no doubt expecting to wipe out Hamas in no time at all.

General George Gage in spades. 

Israeli tanks leaving a trail of death and destruction in Gaza

It’s costing thousands of Palestinian civilian lives. Now it’s even caused the deaths of three Israeli hostages, shot by the very force sent to rescue them, so blunt and misguided an instrument it’s proven to be. And, as ever, it’s undoubtedly recruiting more men into the Hamas terrorist organisation than it’s wiping out – no doubt two, three, maybe even ten new recruits for every Gazan civilian killed.

Teaching us again that harrowing lesson from history, that no one learns lessons from history.

More grandparenting chronicles, with scenes of celebration and exhaustion

With kiddie seats in the car, Danielle and I can’t both travel to the station to pick up our grandkids and one of their parents. So when they joined us for a brief visit last week, I stayed at home while Danielle went to fetch them. On their arrival, Elliott, eager two-and-a-half-year-old that he is, rang the bell rather than wait for a key, and I came out to let them in.

As I approached, I could see him on the other side of the gate.

‘Grandad, granddad, granddad,’ he was chanting while jumping up and down.

Now I don’t have much of a fan club. So it’s good to find one, even if it only has a single member. In any case, if that single member is Elliott, he makes up in enthusiasm and volume for the lack of anyone else celebrating with him.

It amazes me slightly. I’m not aware of having done anything special to excite his admiration. But, hey, I’m certainly not the one to question any unqualified enthusiasm for me.

Enjoy it while you can is my attitude.

So at the gate, I responded to Elliott’s greeting by jumping up and down myself, and chanting, ‘Elly-Belly, Elly-Belly, Elly-Belly’. The others just had to stand around in the street watching our weird behaviour. Once I’d opened the gate, Elliott and I sealed our mutual approval by a fully reciprocated hug.

Part of my charm for Elliott, it turns out, is my apparent willingness to carry him on my shoulders. I say ‘apparent’ because neither of the grandkids is quite the featherweight they were some time ago. Once up there, they seldom show any inclination to get back down, and the effect, not just on my shoulders but also on my back does, eventually, become rather more than I can stand.

That slightly limits my enthusiasm for this pastime, but I try to hide it.

Mode of transport of choice
while enjoying Valencia's Christmas lights

This shoulder-riding business is, by the way, the area in which Elliott most resembles our smaller dog, Toffee. She has a thing about not being made to walk too far. ‘Too far’ in this context can mean a minute or so after leaving our garden. When she feels she’s had enough, she’ll start jumping up and pushing her nose against my leg. Even without words, it’s clear she’s saying, ‘pick me up, pick me up, pick me up’. She does it to me because she’s identified me as a soft touch.

Elliott doesn’t jump up or push his nose into my leg. He just stops in front of me, back to my knees, holds up his hands and informs me, ‘I want to go on your shoulders’. Actually, I think he says, ‘me want to go on your doulders’ but, while I sometimes find it hard to understand what he’s saying, I can’t pretend there’s anything unclear about this message. So up onto my shoulders – or possibly doulders – he goes.

I do this with some dread. Partly because I know it’ll be quite exhausting enough. Partly because I know that at some stage Matilda, who weighs significantly more than Elliott, will be demanding her turn.

Matilda is living proof of a principle of genetics of which I was previously unaware. Her mother, Sheena, is rightly famed for her enthusiasm for long country walks. That’s ‘enthusiasm’ in the broad sense, that runs from total commitment at one end of the scale, to deliberate and sustained procrastination at the other. Without wanting to be critical of a daughter-in-law of whom I’m as fond as I am of Matilda and Elliott, this chronicler’s total attachment to the truth prevents me hiding the fact that Sheena is not at all at the ‘total commitment’ end of the range.

Matilda strides out in style

Elliott training with his sticks

Matilda seems to have inherited all Sheena’s attachment to walks.  So though the kids couldn’t wait to try out their Christmas presents, consisting of their first hiking boots and Nordic Walking sticks, once they’d covered a few hundred metres, she loudly proclaimed her exhaustion. Both she and Elliott now decided it was time I made doulders available to ride on, to avoid over-tiring their legs.

Recovery. And restoration.

Up came Elliott until, once I was reaching the end of my tether, Matilda demanded that I carry her. Committed as I am to complete fairness, I lowered Elliott to the ground (over his objections) and took Matilda instead.

Mode of transport of choice
after a strenuous hike

I coped, if with difficulty, up to the last, steep climb back to the car. Then I lifted her down, much to her annoyance, which I was only able to overcome by adapting the ‘Push-push-push-push’ game I’ve described once before. Normally, this involves a child sitting on a bike while I push him (I say him because it had always been Elliott before) while singing, to the tune of Twinkle, twinkle, little star, ‘push-push-push-push-push-push-push-push-push-push-push-Elly-push-push’.

Matilda was walking rather than on a bike, but I pushed her up the last slope of the path, singing that same sophisticated song, with its complex lyrics, substituting ‘Tilly’ for ‘Elly’. That was so successful that Elliott insisted on my going back down to the bottom of the slope and doing the same with him. ‘Elly’ replaced ‘Tilly’ in the lyrics, but the success was exactly the same.

Talking about Matilda, on the last day of their stay, she asked for her special drinking bottle, the one with lots of twisty, spiral bits and a plastic straw incorporated into the structure itself. We bought it for her at the zoo during a visit by the grandkids some months ago. Then it was filled with some sticky drink that claimed to have the flavour of a fruit though I suspected it had never been anywhere near a fruit or anything else that healthy. Unfortunately, the quality of manufacture of these things is very much on a par with the quality of the contents.

‘I’m sorry, Matilda,’ I told her, ‘it broke and we had to throw it out.’

She pondered this for a moment.

‘That’s a little bit sad, you know,’ she told me eventually, solemnly and perhaps a little reproachfully.

A truthful response seemed the most appropriate.

‘I know,’ I told her, ‘but that’s life, I’m afraid. Things wear out and sometimes they break. That’s sad, you’re right, but it’s just the way things are.’

She contemplated this response, seemed to accept it, and nodded.

‘We can always get another one,’ I assured her, ‘we haven’t been to the zoo for a while, so we can go again next time you come.’

She nodded again.

‘But I choose the flavour of the drink,’ she stipulated.

That was an easy condition to grant. I assured her that I wouldn’t dream of having anyone other than herself choose the flavour of her drink. Apparently satisfied with our conversation, she moved off to find a more entertaining way to pass the time.

Incidentally, Matilda had an important triumph during this stay. On the way out to the walk that had involved my using my ‘push-push’ song, and on the way back, she sat in the car with Toffee on her lap. The kids and the dogs haven’t always seen entirely eye-to-eye, concerning such matters as fur pulling on the one side, and growling on the other. So the fact that she’s now big enough and mature enough to sit with Toffee on her lap, stroking her the way a poodle likes, may be a small step for mankind (and even dogkind), but it’s a leap forward for the two of them.

Elliott’s just as keen on the dogs. But he hasn’t quite learned to bridle his enthusiasm to the point that he treats them with the gentleness they require.

Of course, with me, he’s fully entitled to give free rein to his enthusiasm, unbridled and unlimited. I have no objection at all. Indeed, I welcome it.